In August 2026, a domestic animated film titled Niu Lai (Here Comes the Bull) quietly hit theaters. It had no blockbuster-style marketing campaign, and calling its production quality "crude" would be an understatement. Yet it surpassed 100 million yuan at the box office—not because it was good.
On Bilibili, one video roasting the film garnered 1.37 million views and 2,467 bullet comments. Meanwhile, serious discussions about the movie itself barely scraped 20,000 views. The traffic generated by mocking it is seventy times that of discussing it. I paused for a moment when I saw these numbers.
A Film's "Buyer's Review"
The director of Niu Lai, Xin Yumeng, crafted the entire film solo without any AI assistance—a feat that resulted in a theatrical-release animation with a bizarre art style and production values completely out of sync with same-period blockbusters like Eight Immortals. TVB News summed it up in eight characters: "crudely made, bizarre visuals." In traditional contexts, that’s essentially a death sentence.
But things didn’t go according to script.
In the first few days after release, scattered negative reviews began spreading across social media. Some posted questions like, “How did this get approved for a distribution license?” Others made comparison videos placing the poster next to actual footage—the gap was so wide it became laughable. Then more people flocked to theaters, not out of curiosity about whether it was good, but to see just how bad it really was. By August 16, cumulative ticket sales had crossed 5 million yuan, landing it in the top 10 domestic animated films of 2026. Around August 19, it broke the 100-million-yuan barrier.
A film universally panned as “the worst ever” had become the summer season’s biggest dark horse.
The Economics of Bad Films
There’s something counterintuitive at play here: in the age of the attention economy, “being talked about” is worth more than “being praised.”
Here’s how the transmission chain works: Someone watches the film and finds it truly terrible. They post a roast with screenshots. That roast itself becomes content because it offers novelty value: those who haven’t seen it think, “This can’t be real,” and click in. More people see the roast and decide to experience this outrageous thing for themselves. They watch it, then post their own roasts. And the cycle continues.
Niu Lai’s box office wasn’t driven by word-of-mouth; it was driven by mockery. Everyone who cursed it was doing free promotion. Every share captioned “This is unbelievably bad” pushed it further into public view. The film itself was merely raw material for this viral game; the real product was the content ecosystem built around it.
Was the Director Meme-ing or Being Earnest?
Director Xin Yumeng’s 40-minute interview is an interesting text to examine.
Judging from his statements, he was earnestly trying to make a film. The label “handmade entirely without AI” carries a defiant stance in 2026, when AI-generated content is ubiquitous. He wasn’t intentionally making a bad movie—at least not in his own mind.
But audiences no longer care about your original intent.
Once a work enters the internet’s discursive arena, its meaning is no longer defined by its creator. In the director’s hands, Niu Lai was a creative work; in the audience’s hands, it became a meme; for commentary creators, it became a topic; for news outlets, it became a social phenomenon. Everyone is using it, but in entirely different ways.
This raises a broader question: in an era where everyone has a voice, can creators still control what their work means?
The Triumph of Abstract Culture
The explosive popularity of Niu Lai isn’t an isolated incident—it’s one ripple in the 2026 wave of abstract culture.
Abstract culture, simply put, is a systematic deconstruction of “seriousness.” Traditional aesthetics say this is good, so I’ll insist that’s good instead. Mainstream narratives say this matters, so I’ll focus on what doesn’t. Not out of rebellion, but because in an age of information overload, “seriousness” has lost its filtering function. When everyone says the same movie is great, the word “great” loses its informational value.
But “bad” is different. “Bad” is distinctive—it can be described, screenshotted, and turned into memes. “Bad” provides something scarce: a shared punchline.
In an overseas viral post, someone wrote: “America had Food Fight, and now China has Niu Lai. It feels like people from both countries could exchange a knowing smile.” This captures a cross-cultural resonance: every generation needs its own “bad movie carnival” to affirm, “We’re all in this together.”
The Sequel Is Already Here
The sequel to Niu Lai, titled Yang Gao (Sheep High), has already been officially announced.
This may be the most alarming signal yet. If “bad film + roast-driven virality” proves to be a replicable path to box office success, then it’s no longer just one film’s triumph—it’s the establishment of a new production logic.
Consider what this implies: when “being mocked” is more lucrative than “being praised,” who will spend three years polishing an animation that might earn “good reviews but no buzz”? When directors realize that “crudeness” itself is a selling point, will they still bother drawing each frame with care in their next project?
The film industry has always followed the money. During Hollywood’s B-movie era, earnest filmmakers simply couldn’t survive.
Back to Those Numbers
Let’s return to the statistic from the beginning: videos roasting Niu Lai have seventy times the views of serious discussions about it.
These numbers aren’t really about Niu Lai. They reveal a defining truth of our era: content’s value is no longer determined by the content itself, but by the density of secondary creations it spawns. Whether a film is good or bad no longer matters; what matters is whether it can be discussed, consumed, and converted into material for the next short video.
Niu Lai crossed 100 million yuan. But what broke that record wasn’t the film—it was our era’s hunger for “something interesting,” even if that interest is built upon the ruins of a crude animation.